The Umbrella Effect
by weevily-biscuits
Summary: Myrene, S3-spoilerfree. To Irene Adler, there's no such thing as too much. To Mycroft Holmes, understatement is the sole indiscretion he allows him to indulge in. As Irene's name gets entangled with that of both prominent parties in a surprisingly tasteful and blunt love affair, she piques the interest of the premier Holmes-brother. Rated T for ambiguity, to be on the safe side.
1. 1) - The upper hand

**I**f you seek a mysterious man, head for 221B Baker Street. If you seek a man of mystery, head for the Diogenes Club. The difference between the two of them might be as subtle as the rain dampening your hair on your way there, but assuming that is better left to ordinary people; to people who fail to take the precautions of a good coat, a short friend and a black umbrella.

**W**e both know that the kinship shared between Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes is the worst possible stroke of hard luck, equivalent to that of nitrogen growing up next door to glycerine. But enough said of the sibling feud of which you are already so familiar with. What is interesting to us is how the little brother he so disdained proved to be the convenient answer to a laced problem that had gained the upper hand of the otherwise detached Mycroft Holmes. As Sherlock was summoned to Buckingham Palace, he was not brought forward to prevent a regal scandal from arising. Mycroft Holmes sent for his little brother in order for him to intervene before the former got scandalously attached to someone. He drove the junior detective into her path to pave his own escape. But sticking his heart back into his suit turned out to be infinitely more complex and painful than anticipated for Mycroft.

**F**ew seemed to understand that silence spoke louder than shouts nowadays. If one wanted to make himself clear in a pickle, he should leave sufficient space for the subtext of his words to do its work. But silence had lost its appeal, it seemed. MOD-men, lamplighters, scalp hunters; they were developing a sad habit of extroversion in their work. Even Sherlock was starting to grow larger than life with that deerstalker and the public acclaim he was basking in as a proclaimed internet phenomenon. He ought to have been pleased about this tendency to throw caution to the wind. It would eventually provide him an invaluable advantage, as the world kept on talking in situations where only he knew to guard his tongue behind gritted teeth, but strangely enough, it merely served to annoy him this evening. With pouted lips, Mycroft bent slightly together to peek out over the armrest of the high-backed oxblood chair. There were more empty chairs in the lounge than ever before. And there was hardly any competition at the tea trolley anymore, he added remorsefully to himself, as he dignified himself again and sipped from a cup raised from its saucer. At least there was still comfort to be found in the warmth of the compulsory dashes of rum in the tea.

**I**t was hardly like him to bother about his surroundings. He usually took great pride in distancing himself at every possible moment. It was a necessary precaution, being the man of power that he had become over the last couple of years. Of course, he could not just choose to play the part of the hermit; not if he wanted to have connections and a wide array of strings to play upon in emergencies and at leisure. Sherlock had always failed to understand this. He chose to present himself as being loftier than a cloud, yet still wondered why he was merited the worst of expressions from the not inconsiderable number of people who didn't muster readily into the Sherlock Holmes-fan vessel. Mycroft knew that society was but the lesser of two weevils. Yet when his duty to the world was done for the day, he much preferred to subscribe to his own company. He maintained a standard that was hard to follow for ordinary people. He was accomplished, he was eloquent, he was foresighted, he was attentive and he was realistic; five traits that rarely managed to merge into the frail shells that the human anatomy turned out to be at best. The ordinary fellow would have thought listing up one's qualities verged on sinful self-flattery; Mycroft considered it a statement of fact levelled to that of intelligence people being the most deceitful of all scoundrels. Mycroft had all sorts of useful connections and acquaintances, the former those whom he could heat to evaporation and the latter those whom he could chill to disintegration. But his innermost door was always locked from the inside. He could not afford to be betrayed like ordinary people could.

**A**s he restored the cup to its realm, Mycroft couldn't help but notice a spread-eagled newspaper abandoned in the neighbouring chair. The newspaper itself was not of any interest, just any other tabloid; members of the club had access to an outright infinity of printed paper bundles, tasteful as well as less informative, and they could summon whatever copy they desired from the wardens with a small crack of the wrist – of course the proper precautions had to be taken to make sure that nobody spoke whilst being on the premises. And by the time he got to the club, Mycroft was usually too fed up with reading after the piles of intelligence and unintelligence in Whitehall to bother with another pile of letters. But a combination of names seemed to wave to him from the chair, as if they had been a family ashore beckoning with a handkerchief to the captain of an anchored vessel. Mycroft got to his feet, picked up his tea cup and bowed over the newspaper:

"**M**ENAGE A TROIS WRENCHED DRY BY WOMAN WITH A WHIP_. Prominent novelist Lyall Maskelyne, author of the acclaimed Trafalgar-trilogy, was earlier this morning exposed on Twitter in a most compromising picture of him and a whip-wielding woman at the Greenwich Royal Observatory. The thought of poetic justice crosses one's mind with the recollection of the similar infidelity of Mrs. Serena Maskelyne, the novelist's year-long spouse. Apparently both parties have unknowingly had an affair with the same woman simultaneously. Today's picture was like that of the spouse published by the Twitter-source known as 'TheWhipHand', who has now proven to be the penname of Ms. Irene Adler, the very woman seen with both Mr. and Mrs. Maskelyne in their respective pictures. Ms. Adler has not expressed any statement on the matter apart from the ambiguous 'Know when to be beaten', a motto also to be found in the masthead of her website, recreationalscolding."_

**A** couple of discreet inquiries later, he found himself on the back seat of the compulsory black automobile, staring out at the numerous white mansions of Belgravia. The pristine facades looked positively pigeon-grey when seen through the tinted windows. With one eyebrow dubiously levelled with the strand of hair creasing his forehead, Mycroft averted his gaze past Anthea's shoulder and out the front screen. Puddles of water splashed up on the glass as they soared through the pools plastered on the road, yet he barely noticed the water parting on the glass. He barely noticed anything, to be honest. He had turned his eyes inwards; not to escape the oppressive silence kept between him and his subordinate, but to digest a most coarse meal before the unpredictability of any battle could upset his stomach even further.

**F**rom what he had gathered, this Adler-woman was more than just the odd tempest upsetting the urban ocean of scandals. She was infinitely more than just the common female exhibitionist whom he knew one could deal with at the right price. Irene Adler was a dominatrix, a cat-and-mouse artist with the physical grace of the feline and the mental agility of the rodent. She was intelligent and therefore not one he would be foolish enough to underestimate. She was a boatswain on dry land, executing 'punishments' to subjects more than willing to subject to whatever harshship she might have in store for them. She offered recreational scolding to those capable of paying the price for such a treat.

**I**f Mycroft's memory served him right, the crucial difference between the dominatrix and the craftswoman whom he would label the exhibitionist was the distance they chose to keep to their customers. The dominatrix literally had the upper hand with her clients; the exhibitionist was bought to cater for the wishes of any man seeking her company, no matter how superior she might be to him in terms of mental capacity. On her homepage, she had proffered her customers to 'know when they were beaten'. He still did not know whether to interpret that choice of word as witty or disturbing. He was now on his way to a woman who would certainly beat him, given the chance. But he was in no respects akin to any of the customers she might have given such a treatment in the past. That was not just idle flattery; ever since he attained a position of power, he had made certain to keep a weather eye on every man posing a potential threat to his cloak and dagger-work in the government. One of these men were his younger brother Sherlock, but fortunately the fairer sex had as little appeal to him as rugby or gossip, for that matter.

**A** scarcely clothed woman arousing a scandal and a score of other things best left privy to the imagination would never attract the attention of Sherlock Holmes. Yet it could not be left untouched by his senior, Mycroft Holmes. A person, regardless of gender, who could use her body to her own advantage without the rest of the world taking advantage of it in return, was one to keep an eye out for. The anatomical facets of aforesaid body were of no interest to him. But if she was half as good as that article had sketched her out to be and the handling of both the novelist and his wife had conveyed her as, she had to be subdued, if not kept underneath the umbrella. Keeping her on a leash had crossed his mind and been duly dismissed, though with a thin smile of its aptness. The car keeled slightly to the right and paused next to the damp pavement outside yet another white mansion. Anthea stood sentry behind the door, as she swung it back. Mycroft regained his footing under the raindrops, before he sent her a curt nod and proceeded towards the marble stairs.

**I**t was time for a social call. And when it came down to those, the dominatrix would have to see herself beaten by him. The tip of the umbrella touched the doorbell, and unwillingly, he intercepted his own reflection in the brass number attached to the doorframe. His moist visage conveyed little emotion. Perhaps it was tell-tale enough that his shoulders were littered with shadows of raindrops.


	2. 2) - Unbuttoning and unravelling

**A** sunset-haired woman, dressed in a cloud-white shirt and midnight-dark skirt, appeared behind the even darker door. Mycroft briefly lowered his eyes before he addressed her, making sure to shift his weight onto the folded umbrella that he had planted in the white marble. "I believe Miss Adler is expecting me." The carrot-curled assistant barely allowed herself a moment to digest his words, before she lit up in a complacent smile. "Of course, Mr. Holmes. I will let her know right away that you're here." His contact from Diogenes had staged the introduction on Mycroft's behalf. And thank goodness for that; he would not like to have the dirt commonly found on nude women stuck underneath his nails for all public to see. Indecency and indiscretion kindled the professional funeral pyres for a dozen good men in the government on a daily basis. But it would hardly be difficult to keep this visit a secret to the world. As long as Anthea had her Blackberry with his schedule encased in her palm, her vocabulary was equivalent to that of a metronome. And Sherlock, in spite of his uncanny ability of observing rather than just taking things in, would laugh out loud at the very idea of his neat brother indulging in the anatomical labyrinth of some woman who had thrown propriety to the same wind that had swept all possible garments on her body away.

**H**is junior seemed to nurse the thought of the opposite sex being too intimidating and controversial for Mycroft, whereas he unconditionally presumed that women were predictable and boringly desperate for his attention. Clever Sherlock could not have made a deduction more to larboard of the truth than that one. It provided such a good alibi that Mycroft had allowed the fallacy to persist throughout their adolescence and early adulthood. Mycroft Holmes was not in the least wary of women and their tendency to physically and emotionally exhibit themselves in the face of danger. Their bodies were smoking cannons, waiting to be sponged with wet pads by their subjects; their conduct the grapeshot and cartridges fired at unsuspecting victims.

**S**herlock failed to see that however boring women may occur to him, they had to be understood in order to be avoided and being ahead of. Their whims as well as their bodies had been the downfall of many good men and women throughout the years. Even though their siren song had never managed to run him aground on omnivorous rocks, Mycroft was truly fascinated by them. He also ran people aground on a daily basis, though he approached it in a slightly stealthier fashion than they did. But it was worth stressing that he wasn't fascinated to an extent that he would like to be reminded of their power everyday in what ordinary people defined as a 'relationship'. Relationships were tall ships. You surrendered unconditionally to the mercy of wind, weather and the lice always to be found in even the finest wood work. Mycroft had no need for the laboratory of emotions known as love to study the opposite gender in miniscule detail. He used his eyes for that; one of the few things he and his brother had in common was that they translated the world into facts. The ingenuity and the intelligent touch in Irene Adler's sandwiching of the Maskelynes had brought him here. He knew them, though that hadn't fuelled his actions in the slightest; it had merely blue stamped her intelligence that she had been able to conquer them. The Adler-woman was one of the women Mycroft needed to study in order to stay ahead of. Besides, he needed the intellectual stimulus. One could only cope with so much Sherlock Holmes in a week.

**W**hilst being lost in thought, the assistant had wafted away like gun smoke. He parked his umbrella next to the door and placed the weight on both feet by looking around in the hall. Had it escaped his notice, this was decided proof of the building housing a business unlike any other. There was no need for books or lists to keep track of one's clients. And if Adler's services were but half as good as this grandeur insinuated and the bold words on her webpage had implied, being a woman of power was bound to be lucrative. Miss Adler evidently resorted to a much more aesthetic solution with a mind of its own and its own agenda to advertise her authority. That was certainly relatable. She relied on that red-haired assistant for reasons similar to those he had for keeping Anthea around. Mycroft did little to bridle the smile spurred onto his lips, as he scaled the threshold and unbuttoned his coat. He had not expected to be able to relate to the train of thought of a woman.

"**D**ear me, Mr. Mycroft Holmes. You didn't strike me as a man incapable of holding his horses." Barely had Mycroft looked up to find the trace of the drawling mezzo-pitched voice, before he was approached by a slim middle-aged woman, wearing a transparent negligee that could have done well with some extra years to make its peach content less obvious. "I'm flattered." She added, unfurling her ochre pennant of a mouth into a brazen smile to emphasize the thought she obviously found synonymous to a compliment. Painfully conscious of miss Adler's body not being of a particularly secretive disposition, Mycroft respectfully kept his eyes levelled with hers. It was not easy, but it was a necessary precaution. She planted one blood–stained nail on the third button south of the throat and another on the fabric of his dark coat. He could feel the two fingers exerting their weight on his collar bone. "Trust me; I need no help to unbutton a posh one like you." She reassured him without the slightest wavering and tugged slightly at both button and coat. They parted ways wordlessly; an inch of Mycroft's grey suit presented itself to her, as she brushed the ends away. She briefly allowed her eyes and the two fingers to pave their way further down the torso of the mute Mycroft as if she was deciding whether to continue unbuttoning him. She eventually resurfaced their eye contact and moved a step closer to the icy man. "Keeping your eyes north of my throat. I could grow rather used to this. Should I be flattered yet again, Mr. Holmes?" she asked teasingly.

**A**s she paused, Mycroft angled his head slightly, raising a dubious eyebrow and prepared his answer with a contemplative smile. Careful to make as little noise as possible, he swallowed once to moisten his dry throat. Unbuttoning him. She surpassed his expectations with more altitude than an airplane. In spite of her crudeness and the subtext of her polished words being the dirtiest of gems, she sent sparks of confidence flying from the rails that composed her equally exposé and self-contained body. "Most certainly, miss Adler. One must pay one's respect where respect is due, even if the body meriting that respect does its utmost to distract you." There was something oddly masculine encased in that most feminine conduct. Interestingly enough, it was as if she subconsciously insisted on stressing the second syllable in woman. He had thought he would be able to speak more, being one of the most eloquent men around these parts. Sherlock was a blunt knife in comparison to his skilful composition of words. But this Adler seemed to pose a challenge. He was not sure how to react. Under the circumstances, he might as well assume cold indifference.

**T**he laugh that ensued was more of a full-scale laughter than a faint giggle, adding to the impression of her as a woman of power. "Pleasant in speech as well as appearance. You're as lofty as a feather and as delicate as one, Mr. Holmes. Why haven't we had this pleasure before?" she asked with a sensual stiltedness of speech equivalent to that of licking the surface of every single word before uttering it. Mycroft smiled vaguely. "Had the pleasure, you must surely mean." He corrected and stressed the article in the sentence. She laughed and shook her head in reply; the ivory buns crowning her hair stayed fixed and regal. "I haven't had the pleasure until I've had you properly." She retorted with a bluntness that could have brought any erotic novel to its knees. Now he just couldn't maintain his stoic posture any longer. He smiled at her ambiguity, and he smiled wholeheartedly. She evidently interpreted it as a good sign and eliminated the rest of the distance between them. "Let's have dinner." She prompted. Mycroft feigned to laugh to cloud his imminent confusion. "Alas, no, though I am sorely tempted." He replied politely, trying to jest her with his loftiness as she had done with her brazen ways. "I won't stay to dine, I'm afraid. I'm here about the Maskelynes. How did you do it?" he asked with a raised jaw and an appraising look at her. The man was pushed aside. Now the detective was back on his feet. The better detective, for that matter.

**I**rene smiled smugly, as she took him by the arm and herded him up the stairs whilst she talked. "About poor Lyall? Well, I knew what he liked. Quite ironic, actually. An author of sea stories who likes spanker booms." They laughed almost simultaneously at the pun most certainly intended. Looking at one another, their merriment was fuelled further. They still laughed as they entered what was bound to be her living room. As she sat down and crossed her legs so that they were very visible in all their salmon glory underneath the revealing lace, Mycroft paused in mid-air. A stern look and a mocking smile from the woman made him sit down immediately. He looked at her in spite, yet found that it was curiously pleasing to look at her. "Should I call for tea since you're not staying for dinner? Kate can fetch us some faster than I could tear that suit off you." She said with emphasis. Mycroft smiled at her quaint innuendos and unbuttoned the coat. He slung it across the back of the sofa and sat down next to it.

"**T**hat depends how much there's to learn from you. If you can tell me the rest in less than five minutes, I do have a car waiting at the door. If you can do better than that, tea would be our prerogative." He said, resembling the old Mycroft Holmes more than ever with his confident smile and folded hands. Irene got up with feline grace and disappeared briefly down the stairs to the hallway. She rematerialized in the room almost immediately and sat down on the sofa seat next to his coat. "Now, what on Earth can a man who likes umbrellas and refuses a hot meal want with me?" Irene asked more soberly and tugged her legs underneath her thighs. "You noticed the umbrella?" She nodded in response with a warm, almost friendly, smile drawn on her lips. "It was rather difficult to turn a blind eye when Kate asked me what to do with it in the kitchen. She thought it was a new toy of mine." Once again, they both laughed.

**W**hen one set aside that she presented every aspect of herself four-dimensionally and devoured people through both her eyes and her words, Mycroft had to admit that he was enjoying himself.


End file.
